Singled Out: Eddy Lee Ryder's Holy Sh*t I Think I Love You

09-21-2023

Eddy Lee Ryder just released her new EP, "Blue Hour", and to celebrate we asked her to tell us about the single "Holy Sh*t I Think I Love You". Here is the story:

"Holy Sh*t I Think I Love You" is one of the many songs that came pouring out of me during COVID times. It is one of my favorite songs from start to finish and is on my upcoming EP, Blue Hour. I was torn between calling this song "Holy Sh*t I Think I Love You" aka the first lyric which I thought encapsulated everything I was trying to say or "Against the Wall" or "'Till The Bitter End". Well, leave it to an Instagram poll to determine the answer. While more people voted to make it an appropriate title, two artists I respect very much voted for the former, so that beat out the masses.

I had a particularly bad ending with someone on the first day of COVID, which was unrelated to all of the madness of the time. However, when I started writing, I pointedly decided to (mostly) not be bitter or angry in the music. It did help that I wrote many of these songs about this person when we first met, so I didn't know where to take the stories. It was great that things fell apart so spectacularly; otherwise, I would have never finished the songs! I love that you can hear a strong pull in so many of these lyrics, including this one, between hope and positivity and total sadness and dark humor.

While I tried to stick to that positivity in this song, I think I was in too dark of a place, and so it came off as an unlikely murder epoch instead. I revisited the early voice memos which initially started as a cute lyric about falling for a friend, and I guess the idea was abandoned because of the headspace I was in, so the natural next step was to take it in a very different direction: murder! I wanted to use very visual language in this song. I tried to write a timeless lyric like Paul Simon's "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together," but it came out, "There's a house on the hill, we'll find the owners to kill and grow old." It evolved from there, and I recognized how messed up the lyrics were, so I tried to punctuate them with these very positive, major-sounding "oh oh's" throughout the song, making it a very twisted anthem.

The producer of this song (and the rest of the Blue Hour EP) is Joshua Sadlier-Brown. He is such a great person and so much fun to record with. It was one of the things I really looked forward to at that time, and kept me going. At the time, he was living with his in-laws in CT, and I was living in Woodstock, NY. I would go over to his little studio on their family's beautiful property with a lake and dock. I'd join his family for dinner when we worked and then record. I hope you enjoy the song & thanks for singling me out!

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and stream the full EP here